nd just let
things drift? They looked like that, most of them! And all his inherent
contempt for the average or common welled up as he watched them. Yes,
they looked like that! Ironically, the sight of those from whom he had
desired the comfort of compromise, served instead to stimulate that part
of him which refused to let him compromise. They looked soft, soggy,
without pride or will, as though they knew that life was too much for
them, and had shamefully accepted the fact. They so obviously needed to
be told what they might do, and which way they should, go; they would
accept orders as they accepted their work, or pleasures: And the thought
that he was now debarred from the right to give them orders, rankled in
him furiously. They, in their turn, glanced casually at his tall figure
leaning against the parapet, not knowing how their fate was trembling in
the balance. His thin, sallow face, and hungry eyes gave one or two of
them perhaps a feeling of interest or discomfort; but to most he was
assuredly no more than any other man or woman in the hurly-burly. That
dark figure of conscious power struggling in the fetters of its own
belief in power, was a piece of sculpture they had neither time nor wish
to understand, having no taste for tragedy--for witnessing the human
spirit driven to the wall.

It was five o'clock before Miltoun left the Bridge, and passed, like an
exile, before the gates of Church and State, on his way to his uncle's
Club. He stopped to telegraph to Audrey the time he would be coming
to-morrow afternoon; and on leaving the Post-Office, noticed in the
window of the adjoining shop some reproductions of old Italian
masterpieces, amongst them one of Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus.' He had
never seen that picture; and, remembering that she had told him it was
her favourite, he stopped to look at it. Averagely well versed in such
matters, as became one of his caste, Miltoun had not the power of letting
a work of art insidiously steal the private self from his soul, and
replace it with the self of all the world; and he examined this far-famed
presentment of the heathen goddess with aloofness, even irritation. The
drawing of the body seemed to him crude, the whole picture a little flat
and Early; he did not like the figure of the Flora. The golden serenity,
and tenderness, of which she had spoken, left him cold. Then he found
himself looking at the face, and slowly, but with uncanny certainty,
b